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Fic: Hollow World, Chapter 5
Title: Hollow World
Author: Veldeia
Fandom: Doctor Who
Spoilers: Takes place before Blink. Nothing worth mentioning, really.
Characters/Pairings: 10th Doctor, Martha Jones, OCs. Gen.
Rating: PG
Genre/Category: Adventure, hurt/comfort, drama.
Warnings: WIP
Disclaimer: Not mine. Not making money. Will return everyone good as new once I'm done.
Summary: The 10th Doctor and Martha, stuck in a cave, utterly unprepared and separated from the TARDIS - what else could go wrong?
5. Meeting Point
"Hello?" the Doctor called out.
"Who's there?" a sonorous voice answered him, followed by a higher-pitched, though still masculine one shouting, "Jess? Jess, is that you?"
The Doctor could see the lights stop moving as the people hesitated. Martha seemed nervous, too, staying silent, hovering just behind him. Humans, always so afraid of the unknown.
"Hello! We're friends," he tried again, still walking towards the mysterious people. He waved his hand at them, only to realise that they wouldn't see it in the dim light.
Once they got close enough, the Doctor saw there were three of them, three men, dressed in just the sort of garb one would expect in a cave: mud-covered overalls, helmets and headlights. As they caught sight of the Doctor and Martha, they froze again. He could just make out the baffled looks on their faces.
"Who are you, and what the hell are you doing in here dressed like that?" one of the men said not too politely, in a thick Southern American accent. He seemed to be the oldest of them, in his fifties, maybe.
"Caving, obviously. Same as you," the Doctor answered.
"But - how did you get in?" another man asked, his Queen's English quite the contrast to the first speaker's voice. He was considerably taller and bulkier, too.
"How long have you been here?" said the third man, who was the shortest of the three, and looked youngest as well, thirty-ish. The Doctor couldn't instantly place his dialect, but it was clearly American, like the first speaker's.
Slowly, the facts began to actually sink into his muddled mind. These weren't just any human cavers, but human cavers speaking English in recognisable American and British dialects - they were on Earth, after all!
"We sort of fell in here," Martha answered them. "And we haven't been here very long, a few hours, maybe. Now, I know this is going to sound like a really stupid question, but - where are we, and what year is it?"
"Misery Hole," the youngest man answered, sounding miserable, too.
"Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico, 1969," the oldest man elaborated.
"Ha! We weren't off course at all, then," the Doctor declared. The place, though - the place names sounded vaguely familiar, giving him that always so annoying tip-of-the-tongue feeling. "Misery Hole, Carlsbad Caverns..."
"I can't believe it!" Martha exclaimed, grabbing the Doctor's arm. "We really are on Earth. We're still on Earth!"
"Yes, yes, but -" He was missing something important here. He grabbed at his hair with both hands, but refrained from pacing around, because he didn't entirely trust the ground or his feet. "Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico - ah! Yes! Lechuguilla Cave!"
Both Martha and the three cavers were staring at him like he had lost what was left of his mind.
"Never heard of it," the oldest of the cavers said, sounding dubious.
"It won't be called that in many years. Actually, it - I mean, this - well, maybe not this section of the cave, but the system - is only discovered in the eighties, but then, it becomes really famous for all the unique cave formations - oh!"
Oh. Oh, dear. He fell silent, gazing back at the slightly blurred faces of the four humans.
The name of the place wasn't what he had been missing. Misery Hole, Lechuguilla Cave, the name didn't matter. How come he had never realised this? He had heard of the place before, after all - he had even seen pictures. Those should've rung a bell. Apparently, he had needed to see the things in person to recognise them for what they were.
"The khirindals," he told the others.
"The khirindals," Martha repeated. "The petromites!"
"There can't possibly be petromites on Earth," the Doctor said. "Khiandria has very strict quarantine laws these days, so it's virtually impossible, but more than that, they can't be here, as in, they really, really shouldn't be here."
Could the cavers have ended up here through a rift of some sort? Could they be on another planet, after all? But no, he had seen pictures of Lechuguilla Cave, and there had been khirindals in those pictures. And since Lechuguilla Cave was on Earth, it followed logically that, as impossible as it was, there really were, or at least had been, petromites on Earth.
If this was an active nest, the workers would eventually dig their tunnels under towns and cities, and there would be accidents, cave-ins, collapsed buildings, all sorts of disasters. The Doctor hadn't actually seen any petromites yet, so it was possible that the nest was abandoned. He would have find out. Of course, it would be dangerous, going into those tunnels - not to mention he had no idea how he could actually stop the petromites if he needed to - if only he didn't have this murderous headache. He hung his head, his crossed hands resting on the back of it.
"I'm sorry, could we perhaps start from the beginning here?" the British caver spoke up, interrupting the Doctor's thoughts. "I have absolutely no idea what you have been talking about for the last minute or so. I'm Joseph Stratton. I don't think I caught your names yet?"
"Martha."
"The Doctor."
"Of what?" the oldest caver asked.
"A little bit of everything," the Doctor answered him. "And you are?"
"Geology."
"What? That's your name? Geology?" the Doctor repeated.
The man laughed, quite a sound thanks to his deep voice, and shook his head. "Of course not. I'm a doctor of geology. The name's Grant. So, what's yours?"
"Like I said. The Doctor."
"That really is your name?"
"Yup."
The Doctor could notice Martha was fighting back a chuckle, and the youngest caver seemed to be doing about the same.
"They say you have to be a little crazy to do stuff like this, and I guess they're right," the young man said. "I'm Brian, by the way."
"Brian, Grant, Joseph," the Doctor repeated. "Pleased to meet you. Very pleased, actually, considering the circumstances. Although, if you're stuck here as well, that means we're all stuck here, possibly with petromites, in which case, it's actually not very pleasant for any of us. So, I guess I should say, I'd rather not have met you here, but in some entirely different circumstances, but since we're all here anyway, well -"
Everyone was staring at him again. Was he making any sense at all, or just babbling in gibberish? It wasn't impossible, after all. He couldn't really be sure, could he? "Sorry. Concussion. If I stop making sense, please let me know."
"You're always saying things that don't make sense to most people," Martha noted.
"I am?" the Doctor said, daunted. "Oh. Well. Anyway, where was I? The circumstances. Yes. So -"
"We're stuck," Brian said, before the Doctor had managed to put together anything coherent. "You mentioned that it's a bad thing if we're stuck here, and we are, and yeah, it is. We've been stuck for over a day, we've already lost Jess, we've run out of food, our lights aren't going to last much longer, and there's little hope of us ever getting out of here."
"Actually, there may be more hope for you now that you've met us. You see, we've got a way out," Martha said. "If we can find our way back to it. We can help each other."
"But the way back is sealed shut, blocked by several collapsed passages," Joseph said.
"Our way is a little different," Martha assured them.
Originally, the Doctor's plan of action had been simple: get to the TARDIS as quickly as possible, then get out of here. Once safely out of the cave, they could've taken a look at the planet to see whether the petromites were a problem or not. Now, they needed the answer to that question more than ever, but since the nest was likely to be quite small, it wouldn't be possible to find out from outside the cave. Still, heading for the TARDIS first probably wouldn't be a bad idea.
"Have you got a map?" the Doctor asked. "A survey?"
"Of course," Grant said. He set his tackle bag on the ground, and after some fishing about, produced a large rolled-up plastic pocket, which he spread on the ground, revealing their map of the cave. They all sat down around it.
The Doctor put on his glasses and squinted at the drawing, trying to force all the squiggly lines into some semblance of order. The map seemed to cover the entire area he and Martha had seen so far, and a lot more.
"We're sitting right here at the moment." Grant pointed at a spot. "We were just on our way back from exploring this section," he gestured at the continuation of the passage they were in. It ended in a chamber, which seemed to have a pool in it. "Beautiful columns and draperies, breathtaking, but a little annoying, too, since I've absolutely no idea how those formations came to be."
"Sulphuric acid dissolution, chemolithoautotrophic bacteria, and petromites," the Doctor said.
"Sulphuric acid dissolution?" Grant repeated. "There's a new one. Sounds interesting, you'll need to tell me more about it. Anyway, that's either a dead end or a sump. This is where we originally came from," he went on, tapping at a corner of the map where the lines ended. He started tracing a path with his finger to show their course. "Like Joe said, it's blocked, right there," he tapped at another spot. The line lead to the chamber with the khirindal. They had come here through the petromite tunnels. No wonder they had got trapped.
"And this is where we need to go," the Doctor said, pointing at the top of the cliff where the TARDIS was.
"That's your way out? A cliff top? You want to jump off a ledge?" Brian asked. "Not that I don't understand the feeling, but..."
"No, no, of course not!" Martha said. "It's not the ledge that's important, it's what lies next to it. Please believe us. It's our best hope for getting out of here."
"It's as good an idea as any that we have," Joseph remarked. "After all, we have none, except for exploring these tunnels for as long as we live, on the thin chance of finding an alternative exit."
"True enough. Okay. We've been up there, and there's several routes we could pick. The fastest and most obvious one would be to climb up, but it's a bit challenging, and since you don't seem to have any gear..." Grant mused, his hands still on the map, sizing up the Doctor and Martha.
"No gear, and we're a bit beaten and bewildered, too," the Doctor admitted. "Any alternatives that don't include climbing or rappelling?"
"There's always that one," Brian pointed at one of the many tunnels fanning out from the passage at the bottom of the chasm. This one met with a long passage marked with waves. "We go through to the river, and follow it upstream."
"Oh, I'd rather not go through that again," Joseph complained.
"Sorry, Joe, but he's right, that's probably the easiest way for them," Grant agreed. "It's a little uncomfortable, and not exactly the shortest route, but it's very straightforward, and doesn't require using rope techniques."
"To the river it is, then," the Doctor agreed. "But before we go, say, you wouldn't happen to have any medical supplies? Ace bandages, maybe?"
"Should have some in the first aid kit," Brian told him, and pulled the said kit out of his bag. "Who's hurt? I have first aid training."
"And we're both doctors. Well, sort of," the Doctor said. "Martha, your wrist?"
The young man helpfully offered to bandage Martha's hand, and the Doctor didn't complain. Brian probably did a better job of it than the Doctor would've done. Once he was finished, Martha raised her eyebrows at the Doctor. "What about you?"
"Me? I'm good," he lied. He wasn't, of course, but there was nothing in the cavers' supplies that could help him. "Which way to the beach?"
The adrenaline boost of running first into a khirindal and then into people was fading away all too fast, and the Doctor was again starting to fully register the utterly jumbled state he was in, mind and body alike. As they got up, no matter how slowly he tried to move, his vision greyed out for a few seconds. Not that he could tell if they really were seconds, but it couldn't have been much longer than that, since no one seemed to notice. As he stumbled forwards in a haze that refused to clear up, he wondered how much longer he could hang on.
6. Stratton's Squeeze
Author's Note & Disclaimer: This is where the inspiration for the khirindal, and a good part of the story, came from. Obviously, I haven't been to Lechuguilla Cave, and I'm not writing this fic based on a map or anything, so the geography here is entirely fictional. (I've been to other caves, though. I like caves! :)
Author: Veldeia
Fandom: Doctor Who
Spoilers: Takes place before Blink. Nothing worth mentioning, really.
Characters/Pairings: 10th Doctor, Martha Jones, OCs. Gen.
Rating: PG
Genre/Category: Adventure, hurt/comfort, drama.
Warnings: WIP
Disclaimer: Not mine. Not making money. Will return everyone good as new once I'm done.
Summary: The 10th Doctor and Martha, stuck in a cave, utterly unprepared and separated from the TARDIS - what else could go wrong?
5. Meeting Point
"Hello?" the Doctor called out.
"Who's there?" a sonorous voice answered him, followed by a higher-pitched, though still masculine one shouting, "Jess? Jess, is that you?"
The Doctor could see the lights stop moving as the people hesitated. Martha seemed nervous, too, staying silent, hovering just behind him. Humans, always so afraid of the unknown.
"Hello! We're friends," he tried again, still walking towards the mysterious people. He waved his hand at them, only to realise that they wouldn't see it in the dim light.
Once they got close enough, the Doctor saw there were three of them, three men, dressed in just the sort of garb one would expect in a cave: mud-covered overalls, helmets and headlights. As they caught sight of the Doctor and Martha, they froze again. He could just make out the baffled looks on their faces.
"Who are you, and what the hell are you doing in here dressed like that?" one of the men said not too politely, in a thick Southern American accent. He seemed to be the oldest of them, in his fifties, maybe.
"Caving, obviously. Same as you," the Doctor answered.
"But - how did you get in?" another man asked, his Queen's English quite the contrast to the first speaker's voice. He was considerably taller and bulkier, too.
"How long have you been here?" said the third man, who was the shortest of the three, and looked youngest as well, thirty-ish. The Doctor couldn't instantly place his dialect, but it was clearly American, like the first speaker's.
Slowly, the facts began to actually sink into his muddled mind. These weren't just any human cavers, but human cavers speaking English in recognisable American and British dialects - they were on Earth, after all!
"We sort of fell in here," Martha answered them. "And we haven't been here very long, a few hours, maybe. Now, I know this is going to sound like a really stupid question, but - where are we, and what year is it?"
"Misery Hole," the youngest man answered, sounding miserable, too.
"Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico, 1969," the oldest man elaborated.
"Ha! We weren't off course at all, then," the Doctor declared. The place, though - the place names sounded vaguely familiar, giving him that always so annoying tip-of-the-tongue feeling. "Misery Hole, Carlsbad Caverns..."
"I can't believe it!" Martha exclaimed, grabbing the Doctor's arm. "We really are on Earth. We're still on Earth!"
"Yes, yes, but -" He was missing something important here. He grabbed at his hair with both hands, but refrained from pacing around, because he didn't entirely trust the ground or his feet. "Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico - ah! Yes! Lechuguilla Cave!"
Both Martha and the three cavers were staring at him like he had lost what was left of his mind.
"Never heard of it," the oldest of the cavers said, sounding dubious.
"It won't be called that in many years. Actually, it - I mean, this - well, maybe not this section of the cave, but the system - is only discovered in the eighties, but then, it becomes really famous for all the unique cave formations - oh!"
Oh. Oh, dear. He fell silent, gazing back at the slightly blurred faces of the four humans.
The name of the place wasn't what he had been missing. Misery Hole, Lechuguilla Cave, the name didn't matter. How come he had never realised this? He had heard of the place before, after all - he had even seen pictures. Those should've rung a bell. Apparently, he had needed to see the things in person to recognise them for what they were.
"The khirindals," he told the others.
"The khirindals," Martha repeated. "The petromites!"
"There can't possibly be petromites on Earth," the Doctor said. "Khiandria has very strict quarantine laws these days, so it's virtually impossible, but more than that, they can't be here, as in, they really, really shouldn't be here."
Could the cavers have ended up here through a rift of some sort? Could they be on another planet, after all? But no, he had seen pictures of Lechuguilla Cave, and there had been khirindals in those pictures. And since Lechuguilla Cave was on Earth, it followed logically that, as impossible as it was, there really were, or at least had been, petromites on Earth.
If this was an active nest, the workers would eventually dig their tunnels under towns and cities, and there would be accidents, cave-ins, collapsed buildings, all sorts of disasters. The Doctor hadn't actually seen any petromites yet, so it was possible that the nest was abandoned. He would have find out. Of course, it would be dangerous, going into those tunnels - not to mention he had no idea how he could actually stop the petromites if he needed to - if only he didn't have this murderous headache. He hung his head, his crossed hands resting on the back of it.
"I'm sorry, could we perhaps start from the beginning here?" the British caver spoke up, interrupting the Doctor's thoughts. "I have absolutely no idea what you have been talking about for the last minute or so. I'm Joseph Stratton. I don't think I caught your names yet?"
"Martha."
"The Doctor."
"Of what?" the oldest caver asked.
"A little bit of everything," the Doctor answered him. "And you are?"
"Geology."
"What? That's your name? Geology?" the Doctor repeated.
The man laughed, quite a sound thanks to his deep voice, and shook his head. "Of course not. I'm a doctor of geology. The name's Grant. So, what's yours?"
"Like I said. The Doctor."
"That really is your name?"
"Yup."
The Doctor could notice Martha was fighting back a chuckle, and the youngest caver seemed to be doing about the same.
"They say you have to be a little crazy to do stuff like this, and I guess they're right," the young man said. "I'm Brian, by the way."
"Brian, Grant, Joseph," the Doctor repeated. "Pleased to meet you. Very pleased, actually, considering the circumstances. Although, if you're stuck here as well, that means we're all stuck here, possibly with petromites, in which case, it's actually not very pleasant for any of us. So, I guess I should say, I'd rather not have met you here, but in some entirely different circumstances, but since we're all here anyway, well -"
Everyone was staring at him again. Was he making any sense at all, or just babbling in gibberish? It wasn't impossible, after all. He couldn't really be sure, could he? "Sorry. Concussion. If I stop making sense, please let me know."
"You're always saying things that don't make sense to most people," Martha noted.
"I am?" the Doctor said, daunted. "Oh. Well. Anyway, where was I? The circumstances. Yes. So -"
"We're stuck," Brian said, before the Doctor had managed to put together anything coherent. "You mentioned that it's a bad thing if we're stuck here, and we are, and yeah, it is. We've been stuck for over a day, we've already lost Jess, we've run out of food, our lights aren't going to last much longer, and there's little hope of us ever getting out of here."
"Actually, there may be more hope for you now that you've met us. You see, we've got a way out," Martha said. "If we can find our way back to it. We can help each other."
"But the way back is sealed shut, blocked by several collapsed passages," Joseph said.
"Our way is a little different," Martha assured them.
Originally, the Doctor's plan of action had been simple: get to the TARDIS as quickly as possible, then get out of here. Once safely out of the cave, they could've taken a look at the planet to see whether the petromites were a problem or not. Now, they needed the answer to that question more than ever, but since the nest was likely to be quite small, it wouldn't be possible to find out from outside the cave. Still, heading for the TARDIS first probably wouldn't be a bad idea.
"Have you got a map?" the Doctor asked. "A survey?"
"Of course," Grant said. He set his tackle bag on the ground, and after some fishing about, produced a large rolled-up plastic pocket, which he spread on the ground, revealing their map of the cave. They all sat down around it.
The Doctor put on his glasses and squinted at the drawing, trying to force all the squiggly lines into some semblance of order. The map seemed to cover the entire area he and Martha had seen so far, and a lot more.
"We're sitting right here at the moment." Grant pointed at a spot. "We were just on our way back from exploring this section," he gestured at the continuation of the passage they were in. It ended in a chamber, which seemed to have a pool in it. "Beautiful columns and draperies, breathtaking, but a little annoying, too, since I've absolutely no idea how those formations came to be."
"Sulphuric acid dissolution, chemolithoautotrophic bacteria, and petromites," the Doctor said.
"Sulphuric acid dissolution?" Grant repeated. "There's a new one. Sounds interesting, you'll need to tell me more about it. Anyway, that's either a dead end or a sump. This is where we originally came from," he went on, tapping at a corner of the map where the lines ended. He started tracing a path with his finger to show their course. "Like Joe said, it's blocked, right there," he tapped at another spot. The line lead to the chamber with the khirindal. They had come here through the petromite tunnels. No wonder they had got trapped.
"And this is where we need to go," the Doctor said, pointing at the top of the cliff where the TARDIS was.
"That's your way out? A cliff top? You want to jump off a ledge?" Brian asked. "Not that I don't understand the feeling, but..."
"No, no, of course not!" Martha said. "It's not the ledge that's important, it's what lies next to it. Please believe us. It's our best hope for getting out of here."
"It's as good an idea as any that we have," Joseph remarked. "After all, we have none, except for exploring these tunnels for as long as we live, on the thin chance of finding an alternative exit."
"True enough. Okay. We've been up there, and there's several routes we could pick. The fastest and most obvious one would be to climb up, but it's a bit challenging, and since you don't seem to have any gear..." Grant mused, his hands still on the map, sizing up the Doctor and Martha.
"No gear, and we're a bit beaten and bewildered, too," the Doctor admitted. "Any alternatives that don't include climbing or rappelling?"
"There's always that one," Brian pointed at one of the many tunnels fanning out from the passage at the bottom of the chasm. This one met with a long passage marked with waves. "We go through to the river, and follow it upstream."
"Oh, I'd rather not go through that again," Joseph complained.
"Sorry, Joe, but he's right, that's probably the easiest way for them," Grant agreed. "It's a little uncomfortable, and not exactly the shortest route, but it's very straightforward, and doesn't require using rope techniques."
"To the river it is, then," the Doctor agreed. "But before we go, say, you wouldn't happen to have any medical supplies? Ace bandages, maybe?"
"Should have some in the first aid kit," Brian told him, and pulled the said kit out of his bag. "Who's hurt? I have first aid training."
"And we're both doctors. Well, sort of," the Doctor said. "Martha, your wrist?"
The young man helpfully offered to bandage Martha's hand, and the Doctor didn't complain. Brian probably did a better job of it than the Doctor would've done. Once he was finished, Martha raised her eyebrows at the Doctor. "What about you?"
"Me? I'm good," he lied. He wasn't, of course, but there was nothing in the cavers' supplies that could help him. "Which way to the beach?"
The adrenaline boost of running first into a khirindal and then into people was fading away all too fast, and the Doctor was again starting to fully register the utterly jumbled state he was in, mind and body alike. As they got up, no matter how slowly he tried to move, his vision greyed out for a few seconds. Not that he could tell if they really were seconds, but it couldn't have been much longer than that, since no one seemed to notice. As he stumbled forwards in a haze that refused to clear up, he wondered how much longer he could hang on.
6. Stratton's Squeeze
Author's Note & Disclaimer: This is where the inspiration for the khirindal, and a good part of the story, came from. Obviously, I haven't been to Lechuguilla Cave, and I'm not writing this fic based on a map or anything, so the geography here is entirely fictional. (I've been to other caves, though. I like caves! :)
